Netanyahu trip highlights India’s tiny Jewish community

PETER HUTCHISON

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Shrinking population, dating back some 2,000 years, hopes the Israeli PM’s week-long visit will boost its profile

Members of the Indian Jewish community attend a morning prayer service at the Magen David Synagogue in Mumbai, January 9, 2018. (AFP Photo/Indranil Mukherjee)

MUMBAI, India (AFP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make an emotional visit this week to a Jewish center targeted in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in a trip that India’s tiny and shrinking Jewish community hopes will boost its profile.

Netanyahu will talk trade in New Delhi and marvel at the Taj Mahal before rounding off his visit in Mumbai, where the majority of India’s estimated 4,500 Jews live.

There he will accompany 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg as the boy returns for the first time to the house where his parents were killed in the 2008 terror attacks that left 166 people dead.

At Mumbai’s Magen David synagogue, worshipers were excited about the first visit to India by an Israeli leader in almost 15 years.

“It’s very good news for us. We’re very lucky to get to see the prime minister over here,” Joel Gershon Awaskar told AFP after concluding his morning prayers.

Members of the Indian Jewish community attend a morning prayer service at the Magen David Synagogue in Mumbai, January 9, 2018. (AFP Photo/Indranil Mukherjee)

Netanyahu will be only the second Israeli prime minister to visit India and the first since Ariel Sharon in 2003. The visit comes six months after Indian leader Narendra Modi toured Israel.

Jonathan Solomon, chairman of the Indian Jewish Federation, said the reciprocal visits and warm ties between the two countries are of the “utmost importance” to Jews in India.

“The closer the cooperation, the closer the Jewish community in India feels to Israel. So we feel recognized and we feel secure,” he said.

It is not just recognition from abroad that many Indian Jews crave.

Although historians believe Jews first arrived in India 2,000 years ago, their descendants today say they are virtually unknown in a country where they are hugely outnumbered by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Zoroastrians.

Nor are Jews officially recognized as a minority community by India’s government.

‘We’ll become well known’

India is in fact home to several distinct Jewish groups.

These include Bene Israelis, who have the longest history in India, and Baghdadi Jews, who fled persecution in the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Although there are no official figures, academics say India’s Jewish population peaked at around 20,000 in the mid 1940s.

Numbers have dwindled rapidly because of emigration since the creation of Israel in 1948.

Members of the Indian Jewish community attend a morning prayer service at the Magen David Synagogue in Mumbai, January 9, 2018. (AFP Photo/Indranil Mukherjee)

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